Personal mobile communication/computing devices, such as cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and two-way pagers, have become ubiquitous in most modern countries. These devices can be collectively referred to as “mobile devices”. Many of the latest generation of mobile devices provide their users with the ability to access resources on the Internet via wireless telecommunications networks (or simply, “wireless networks”). For example, some of these mobile devices allow their users to access World Wide Web pages, exchange email and download files over the Internet. Devices which can access the World Wide Web include a software application called a browser, which when implemented in a small (e.g., handheld) mobile device is sometimes more precisely referred to as a “minibrowser” or “microbrowser”. With the introduction of so-called “2.5G” and “3G” mobile devices, mobile devices will have a much broader range of capabilities than ever before.
Yet many users of mobile devices never or rarely use the most powerful data-centric capabilities of these devices, particularly the browser. One of the main reasons for this is that many users are not technologically sophisticated and, thus, are not aware of the full capabilities of their devices. Other users are aware of the browser but do not know how to use it. Users of cellular telephones in particular may be aware of the browser but rarely think to use it, because they think of the cellular telephone as primarily a voice communication device and not a data-centric device. It does not occur to many users that often web content that is relevant to their current situation is easily accessible to them simply by using the browsers of their mobile devices. Still other users are aware of the browser and may even know how to access the Web, but do not understand how to enter a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) on a small mobile device such as a cellular telephone. Such an operation normally involves inputting a long character string, which is not an intuitive operation on cellular telephone or other mobile device that has a limited keypad.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to make such mobile devices more user-friendly, and hence, more useful to their users. In particular, what is needed is a way to make the Internet access capabilities of mobile devices, especially browsers, more discoverable by their users and to encourage use of such capabilities.